You’ve played the role of the Empress’ protector, and now you will experience Dishonored from the other side of the coin. Watch our newly released trailer for Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall, which puts you in the role of Daud — the assassin responsible for Empress Jessamine’s death.

Those that have played through Dishonored know Daud possesses the Mark of the Outsider — granting him supernatural abilities. But don’t expect to be playing as a Corvo clone — Daud can call for help with ‘Summon Assassin’, track down runes and bone charms with “Void Gaze”, and his variation on Blink allows him to stop time — even in mid air.

You’ll needs these powers, as well as stealth weapons like Daud’s custom wristbow and arc mines to survive some of the most challenging areas in Dunwall — including the Rothwild Slaughterhouse, Legal District, and a return to Daud’s hidden base in the Flooded District. Nothing you can’t handle, right?

As with Dishonored, we encourage you to play The Knife of Dunwall in whatever play style suits you best — be it action or stealth focused, or somewhere in between. Daud’s redemption (or turn towards darkness) lays in your hands.

The Knife of Dunwall releases on Tuesday, April 16th on PlayStation Store for $9.99.

With Dishonored, the team at Arkane Studios let you decide what type of assassin you wanted to be – you could focus on stealth and remain in shadow, or simply leave a trail of blood across the game’s missions. However you played, by the game’s end, you had become Dunwall’s greatest assassin.

But how do you stack up about against the rest of the world?

In Dishonored’s new DLC, Dunwall City Trials, all your skills will be tested across 10 challenge maps. Providing a challenge to all levels of players, these maps will require you to creatively combine your supernatural abilities, weapons and gadgets with well-timed stealth and agility tactics.

Read below for a quick overview of the Challenge Maps:

As you complete challenges, you’ll receive a completion rating and score and be able to see how you stack up against the competition via leaderboards. Additionally, Dunwall City Trials unlocks 10 new trophies, including:

Purchase Dunwall City Trials today on the PlayStation Store for $4.99.

Dishonored is a complex, nuanced game that empowers players to make important decisions — not the least of which is who lives and who dies. To ease the learning curve, I’ve put together some helpful (and spoiler-free!) tips to get you sneaking smoothly on day one. If you picked up a copy of the game, share your own strategies in the comments below.

1. Playing lethal is easier, but nonlethal is more fun. One of Dishonored’s fundamental charms is that a properly motivated player can progress through the entire game without killing a soul. The nonlethal route requires patience and sacrifice, and as such you’ll rely on running, hiding, and stealthy strangulations punctuated by the occasional Sleeping Dart. But it’s also immensely rewarding, giving the game a supercharged nervous tension as you stalk your prey, then Blink in from behind to deliver a sleeper hold using R2.

Of course, slashing off heads and slitting throats is all in good fun too, and it may be an easier approach for beginners. Because your death count has an effect on Dishonored’s storyline and even some of the enemy types you’ll encounter, it pays to make a choice early on and try to stick to it.

2. Max out Blink and Dark Vision right away. Whether you employ lethal or nonlethal tactics, these two skills are flat-out indispensible. Blink is a short-ranged instantaneous teleport that’s useful for both navigation and offense. Spend extra Runes and you’ll upgrade your teleporting range. Dark Vision is also a go-to, and enables you to peer through walls to see patrolling guards and other lurking threats. Upgrade Dark Vision to highlight any nearby loot or traps, too.

3. Shadows won’t save you. Most stealth games task you with using darkness to cover your movements. But Dishonored puts the emphasis on line of sight — that means you’ll want to keep objects and structures in between yourself and enemies as much as possible, peeking out using the Triangle button. Shadows still help conceal you, but only to distant enemies.

4. Upgrade your Bone Charms early. With the help of a gruesome device called the Heart, you’ll be able to see hidden Runes and Bone Charms that are stashed amongst Dunwall’s many nooks and crannies. Bone Charms bestow passive bonuses such as more health, extra mana from potions, and faster nonlethal takedowns; Runes go towards new skills and skill upgrades.

By default, you’re limited to equipping three Bone Charms at a time. But spend a few Runes and you can raise that limit to six Bone Charms, a price absolutely worth paying as soon as you can afford it.

5. Sleeping Darts are the best weapon in the game. These little beauties are worth your attention whether you’ve chosen lethal or nonlethal tactics. Sleeping Darts are cheap, quiet, and knock out most enemies with just one hit. In fact, their only shortcoming is the fact that you can carry just 10 at a time. Use them wisely!

6. Use grenades as pest control. Dishonored’s grenades pack a punch, but they’re best saved for close encounters with ravenous rat packs — one well-placed explosive will smear the whole lot of them, saving you a lot of frantic leaping and shrieking. Grenades are also handy against river krusts, the acid-spewing barnacle-like creatures you’ll sometimes find breeding underneath docks and near sewer drains.

7. Fight only when you must. That towering Tallboy makes for a tempting target, right? Though you could probably pop an oil tank with a well-placed Incendiary Arrow, it’s safer and smarter to avoid conflict, using stealth to bypass it or the Possess spell to temporarily assume command. Weepers are another major nuisance, especially later in the game — your best bet is to run and hope they lose interest!

Early in your adventure, you will receive “The Outsider’s Mark” — a mysterious tattoo on your left hand that grants you supernatural abilities. As you progress through the game, this mark will allow you to unlock new abilities, each of which can be upgraded to a second level for improved functionality.

Below is a look at two of the development team’s favorite abilities:

Devouring Swarm

Devouring Swarm summons a vicious swarm of rats that will consume corpses or attack the nearest living thing. Level two summons a larger, more vicious swarm of rats.

Wind Blast

Wind Blast releases a powerful blast of wind, knocking your enemies off their feet. This power will also douse fires, shatter wooden doors, and reflect projectiles back at the enemy who fired them. Level two increases the power of the blast.

Have questions about the game? Let us know in the comments below. And if you’re looking to play the game tomorrow, don’t forget it’s available as a PSN Day 1 title!

Outside of PlayStation’s own announcements, the indisputable big-buzz game of Gamescom 2012 was Dishonored, the upcoming PS3 first-person stealth adventure from Bethesda. With relatively low-key showings in Cologne from many of the other major third party publishers, Dishonored really got its chance to shine last week and it duly dazzled all comers.

For the uninitiated, the game puts you in the shoes of wronged assassin Corvo Atano who is framed for the murder of an Empress – his former lover. You’ll be sneaking around a dark, atmospheric steampunk world, combining supernatural powers and a range of weaponry to avenge her death and unmask those who’ve conspired against you.

To be clear, when we say stealth we don’t mean the signposted sneaking of, say, recent Splinter Cell titles. The AI here is unforgivingly old school – more redolent of the likes of Thief. And that should come as no surprise – co-creator Harvey Smith worked on that series, as well as the original Deus Ex and BioShock precursor System Shock. We caught up with him back stage at Gamescom to learn more about his latest project.

PlayStation.Blog: What are Dishonored’s core gameplay building blocks?
Harvey Smith, Co-Creative Director, Dishonored: It’s a matter of falling back on values. We generally like the first person perspective – to give you that ‘you are there’ thing. We like RPG upgrade systems. We like analog AI, so enemies are not necessarily aware of you or unaware of you – they’re uncertain. They may have heard you, but they’re not sure, so they go and investigate. Surfing the edge of awareness, basically. We love highly mobile games; we don’t like games where you’re heavy and stuck on the ground and you have big weapons and you can’t get on top of buildings as they’re just props. We really want you to be able to flit up there like a flea.

PSB: The stealth mechanics seem really challenging compared to more recent examples of the genre…
HS: We decided to go with ‘view cone’ based stealth. Enemies have a view cone. Their peripheral vision is weaker and they don’t see as well up high – it’s squashed so you can hide in the rafters. The deal is that if you’re in front of their view cone they see you, no matter what the lighting levels. Even if I turned out the lights right now, I’d still be able to see you, right? So we decided to go with something realistic.

The truth is that we tried all of the models you can think of. We tried the ‘pool of shadow’ model, but modern players would say the AI looks bad if I’m in a shadow and an enemy walks right by me. That looks dumb. They want a more reactive system. And that makes it a little more hardcore. To sneak, you really have to stay behind cover, lean out behind walls. It requires you to really know where an enemy is looking and avoid that range.

PSB: You claim that it’s possible to finish the game without killing a single person. How challenging is that going to be compared to going in guns drawn?
HS: It’s pretty easy to avoid killing a standard guard. You just throw a bottle and when he goes to investigate you sneak by. But it gets much harder for the key targets. For example, there’s a mission where you get sent to kill two brothers who are corrupt members of parliaments. You can go straight ahead and kill them – they’re in a bathhouse – or you can do a side quest for a crime lord. If you do the right things for him he will have them captured, their tongues cut out, their heads shaved and then put to work in their own mines where nobody will know it’s them. It’s poetic justice. It’s dark, but not as dark as killing them. The two approaches are hard in different ways. The game gets very reactive if you just go in guns blazing – it fights back. But, on the other hand, stealth demands patience.

PSB: Many older gamers will be really excited to hear about a return to these sorts of values, but do you think younger gamers, who’ve never played Thief or the original Deus Ex, will get it?
HS: I have a great deal of faith in those people. When we release a game like this kids sometimes come to us and say ‘this game blew my mind; I didn’t know games could do this; I only played very linear games before’. That’s what we like to hear. I actually have more faith in the 13-year-olds as they’re playing things like Day Z or Dwarf Fortress or Eve Online. They’re hungry for highly interactive, non-dogmatic experiences, I think.

Dishonored creeps onto PS3 October 9th in North America. Look out for more coverage here on the Blog in the coming weeks!

Some games have problems with bugs, but this game has trouble with rats. Big, evil ones that prowl in packs and can rend a man’s flesh from his screaming bones. But killer rats are the least of your worries in the dark world of Dishonored, an imaginative action-adventure from Arkane Studios and Bethesda coming to PS3 later this year. The game nimbly blends inspirations from a pantheon of modern classics: The oppressive atmosphere and paranoid politicking of BioShock, the graceful bloodletting of Assassin’s Creed, the murky morality of Deus Ex, the stealth and shadow of Thief. This is a game about skulking in dark places, eavesdropping on secret conversations, setting up the perfect ambush and beating a hasty retreat.

You play as Corvo, an elite royal bodyguard wrongly accused of assassinating the Empress of Dunwall. Locked in a prison and left to rot, you’re sprung by a shadowy benefactor and set loose to claim your revenge in whatever manner you see fit. Though Corvo is a convincing protagonist the real star here is the city of Dunwall, a crumbling seaport perched over a vast and malignant ocean. Dunwall’s decaying decor is the handiwork of the man behind Half-Life 2’s iconic City 17, and the attention to detail is palpable: Steampunk carriages slide down cobblestone streets as stormtroopers patrol atop giant biomechanical stilts. It’s old and new, weird and familiar, beautiful and grotesque all at the same time. If you liked BioShock’s Rapture, you’re gonna love this.

Touched by an amoral deity called the Outsider, Corvo now wields an array of supernatural abilities, everything from teleportation and time dilation to summoning hordes of voracious rats and pushing projectiles back at enemies. One supernatural talent enables you to enter the body of a fish or rat, handy for infiltrating a building via a drain pipe or access panel. In combat, Corvo has little to fear, being a master swordsman and pistol marksman. Exotic ammunition types (explosive bullets, tranquilizer darts) and gadgets such as grenades and proximity mines further expand the possibilities. As in Deus Ex you can strike openly, spilling beaucoup buckets of blood in the process, or pull your punches by quietly choking out enemies and tucking their snoozing bodies safely away.

Whether you coldly kill adversaries or show mercy will have consequences on the game’s story — the Outsider himself is curious to see which path you follow. It will also factor in the moment-to-moment gameplay: snuff out a guard and his buddy might alter his patrol route to cover the gap, potentially disrupting your carefully laid plans. But whichever way you play will be the “right” way to play — Arkane’s goal is to put players in full control of the game’s pacing.

As you unravel the conspiracy behind the Empress’ assassination and an apparent military coup, you’ll meet a host of sketchy characters, from members of a secretive resistance movement to spoiled aristocrats and plague-stricken townspeople. Some will become targets of your wrath and will need to be dealt with accordingly, while others will provide valuable information or services.

If Dishonored sounds like your cup of tea, check back early tomorrow for the next episode of Official PlayStation Blogcast and an interview with co-directors Harvey Smith and Raf Colantonio. Have questions about the game right now? Sound off in the comments and I’ll pass along what I know!